Mantis Overview:

Mantis is a free web based bug tracking tool. It is written in PHP language and requires MySQL database and a webserver to run it. This tool can be installed on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, OS/2, and a variety of Unix operating systems. You can use any Web Browser as a Client.

Mantis is a database of bug reports, with a front end that facilitates actions such as filing new bug reports, changing the state to reflect the progress of the work done to address the bug, and generating reports on the bug data.

Great product - easy to install and configure - works very well with our workflow and has been easy to customise when needed.- Alastair Briggs - Luzia R Research.

Mantis Features:

• The installation of Mantis is pretty much simple.The installation procedure guides you through each necessary reference and selection criteria accordingly by displaying on monitor.

• Also, it is easily modifiable, customizable, and upgradeable Open Source.
• Bug reporting is fairly straightforward. A simple form comes up by default. You can switch to the advanced report, which adds fields for product version, operating system, plus several others. Also, You can add custom fields. This tool also provides basic search facility.
• Browsing existing bugs is not difficult. There are several filters at the top of the View Bugs page that can help you focus on the bugs you want to look at. There is a CSV export feature that could allow you to use another program to do more sophisticated reporting. You might find yourself directly querying the database to get decent reports.
• Mantis also provides email notification and RSS Syndication News. There are several ways to customize email delivery, including replacing PHP’s standard mail function with PHPMailer.
• Mantis is available in several different languages.
• You can set up multiple projects in the database, and users can view bugs in all of their projects at once if they want to.
• Support is also very good. There are five mailing lists for Mantis - mantisbt-announce, mantisbt-cvs, mantisbt-dev, mantisbt-help, mantisbt-lang and five web forums for Mantis.

Disadvantages:

• Some basic features, such as searching, aren’t available for custom fields.
• Although, it provides CSV export feature, some developers complain it doesn’t include enough of the fields to be very useful.
• The user documentation is maintained on manual.mantisbt.org and is not available in the local installation. This means that the documentation you’re reading might not match the version of Mantis that you have installed.

Conclusion:

I foresee that Mantis will be around for a long time. Whenever I have influence on the decision of and use of a software bug tracking system then Mantis will be my choice!

Personally, I’ve spent a lot of hours pouring over a massive number of packages available for issue tracking. I always end up coming back to Mantis. The price can’t be beat. And for those who don’t want to install and configure a Mantis Bug Tracking System then they offer a “Hosted” plan for a minimum cost. -Timothy Trimble, The ART of Software Development.

Filed under Enterprise Software

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Enterprise Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.